Vatican demanded immunity from testifying

I’m very ambivalent about WikiLeaks and especially about the diplomatic data dump, but I must say, the Vatican stuff is certainly worth having (and it’s not something the Vatican has any moral right to keep secret, either). The more we know about the inner workings of the Vatican, the better.

Typical Vatican, isn’t it? Not shock-horror and remorse about rape and physical violence by clergy, but “offense” at failure to “respect” Vatican “sovereignty.” It’s all about them, and it’s all about them not as perps but as offended dignitaries.

Ultimately, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (equivalent to a prime minister), wrote to the Irish embassy, ordering that any requests related to the investigation must come through diplomatic channels.

Typical. Not “Yes yes of course we’ll help you in every way we can”; on the contrary, “No no, how dare you, you have to go through diplomatic channels, we are a Sovereign Nation as well as Divine Intermediaries with God Himself.”

As usual with the Vatican, the reserves of disgust are quickly exhausted.

Once again, we see the Vatican invoking their status as sovereign State to exempt themselves from lawful accountability to the local secular authorities. They should make up their minds (and secular governments need to demand this from them): they can be just another church subject to the local laws, like the Anglicans, Baptists, etc; or they can be a sovereign State — in which case, the entire in-country organization, right down to the parish priest, shall be deemed to be agents of a foreign power, promoting said power’s interests, and illegal acts will be treated as foreign subversion, possibly even treason. Also the Pope won’t get to publicly scold his hosts for their failure to Do Things His Way when he comes a-callin’, any more than any other head of state does.

As to the unease over Wikileaks, I think the central issue here is best expressed by on The Times Brendan Boyle, emphasis mine:

Citizens and their media have obligations, but the protection of the state’s secrets cannot be made their responsibility. If governments cannot secure their own database of diplomatic despatches, then let them take the pain of occasional breaches and learn to do better.

I just don’t think it’s the case that all secret communications should be exposed, and I don’t particularly trust Julian Assange to decide which should and which shouldn’t. I think it’s way too glib to say “if governments leave the door unlocked, well then tough.”

Diplomacy, as such, is not a bad thing. Some diplomacy is bad of course, but Diplomacy is not. I’m just not at all convinced I want random activists exposing absolutely everything about everything.

It’s inaccurate to call the release of the diplomatic cables a “data dump.” WikiLeaks shared the cables with mainstream news organizations, and is only publishing what those organizations decided to publish.

The cable leaks included a lot of important revelations: the U.S. military’s policy of turning a blind eye to abuses in the Iraqi army, the U.S. pressuring Spain and Germany not to investigate things the U.S. had did to Spanish and German citizens, etc.

Granted, if I were Assange, I would have told the news organizations I was working with, “Please don’t publish any bullshit about diplomat’s opinions on what world leaders are and are not alpha dogs – anything like that. Gossip like that probably shouldn’t be made public, and will just distract attention from the important revelations in these documents.”

But it’s clear that the cable leaks were a very good thing, on the whole.

Ok. I haven’t yet done the hard work of sorting through the stuff…but that’s part of the problem, isn’t it. The Pentagon papers were about one (very large) subject. This release…isn’t. It feels like a data dump to me!

, and I don’t particularly trust Julian Assange to decide which should and which shouldn’t. I think it’s way too glib to say “if governments leave the door unlocked, well then tough.”

So who does decide? The people who have a vested interest in making sure that torture, false justifcations, innocent deaths due to ‘collateral damage’? I guess the world would look a lot nicer if those folks could keep this stuff secret.

The guys who decided what should be revealed were Wikileaks’ press partners who published them first before Assange added them to his website, and he maintained their redactions.

Also, we cannot in good conscience to my mind slam theocracies for their treatment of the press and support the frankly illegal actions being taken against Assange. How can we stand up for freedom of the press in Saudi Arabia, and then turn around and support what is going on with Wikileaks?

You would have thought after the last ten years we would take stock of that, we wouldn’t make the same mistake of parotting official lines the press did when it was the Iraq war, we wouldn’t print glorified PR the way we did in the build-up to the recession.

The whole affair should be shocking us. It should be making us sit-up and take notice, not simply at what was revealed but what has been done to try and make the very act of revelation taboo. How so much of the columnist coverage, by journalists, has essentially been anti-journalism.

Now obviously I have an interest in this because I work for The Times, and in the past year we had a journalist at my workplace arrested shortly after he worked on a story that proved highly embarassing to our cops. I see a lot of parallels here with the Information Bill and the proposed Media Tribunal in South Africa, I have my biases, but it shocks me how even despite this, I am not shocked at this whole affair.

We should, as a profession and as citizens of the world, be horrified at the coverage this has gotten. We should be sickened when Westerners call for Assange death for what a lot of legal experts say isn’t even illegal (Note I am not talking about the charges he is facing in Sweden where I hope he gets a fair trial, I am talking about what people are saying should be done to him for the leaks).

The fact that credit card companies pressured by the US government to cut ties with Wikileaks without a single criminal charge being brought should at the very least be a wake-up call.

And here we are, acting like this is almost to be expected. Like the press should be licensed, nothing more than the ruling party’s propaganda wing.

I agree with Brendan Boyle here – it is not for the press to keep the government’s secrets. That is for the government to do. Our job isn’t to support government, but to interrogate it. We are supposed to be the fourth estate.